Don Laliberte was at Holman in the last couple of weeks and he took a look at the Nashua Lions Club Sports Legends of Holman plaque on the concourse that has the names of all those inducted into the Holman Legends Hall.

“It choked me up a little bit to see the company I’m going to be with,” Laliberte, the former Bishop Guertin top athlete from the mid 1960s said this past week. “Some of which I grew up with and respected. Coach Piwowarski is up there, he’s somebody I respected for everything he helped me with. … the main benefactor for Bishop Guertin, Larry Elliott. I played with some of his boys at BG. These are all people I grew up around, respected, admired.”

There are a lot of worthwhile honors and Halls of Fame out there, but this one is extremely special. Why? Because it not only honors the athletes, but the place they played in. The atmosphere that was created. This year Laliberte, former Nashua High running back Don Grandmaison and former longtime BG coach and athlete Mike Lozeau will be inducted. The Stadium was a special place for all of them.

It’s a special event every July 4 on the field, just a little while before the snap, crackle, pop of the city’s annual fireworks show. The day’s festivities begin, actually, at 11 a.m.when the Nashua Silver Knights take on the Vermont Lake Monsters in a rematch of last year’s finals. It’s the second year in a row the city and Silver Knights have partnered up to bring baseball to the holiday.

And the Legends of Holman is a great way to conclude the sports for the day. It’s become tradition, and the inductees are always surprised – and thrilled.

“It means a lot,” Lozeau said, noting that there was always the feeling that Bishop Guertin might have more of an uphill climb for such honors.

You stop and think of all the time that Lozeau has spent at Holman, as a player in Pop Warner football, Babe Ruth baseball, etc. and then playing for Bishop Guertin, and certainly a fabulous career coaching football as an assistant and baseball as the Cards head coach for parts of three decades. Holman was and will always be special to him.

“I love living a block away and hearing the sounds coming from Holman,” Lozeau said. “But I really miss the fall sounds from the bands and the football games (which are now at Stellos).”

How fitting is this? Lozeau even worked on the Park-Rec crew in 1970-71 that moved the baseball field around, as home plate used to be in present day right field. His father had the concession contract for a couple of years and he worked there.

Heck, he even played in an over-30 baseball league at Holman in the 1990s for several years, playing a few games at Holman (Nashua Cubs). When he took over as baseball coach, he tried to avoid playing games at Guertin’s Elliott Field, and would work to have the Cards play most if not all of their games at Holman. Loving the atmosphere at the Stadium and the challenge, he also pushed to have BG play Nashua twice in baseball, even it Guertin would be an underdog most of the time. “I didn’t care,” he said. “Sometimes if we won, it would turn our season around. … It was always something special to play them.”

Holman certainly was and is special to Lozeau, who spends most of his time now with his family and watching his grandkids play sports and dance.

Laliberte knows he was a “pioneer” as far as Guertin went, a member of the Cardinals first graduating class in 1967 and first football team a couple of years before that – as well as a former UNH football standout. He was a top baseball player for BG, but you have to remember back then Guertin was a small school, and such athletic achievements were a big deal. You had to laugh when he talked about the leather football helmets that could be folded and put away.

Grandmaison is a very private individual, does not talk about his high school prowess, but there are certainly many accounts of his success in the late 1950s with Nashua. As the story goes, the speedster was brought up to the varsity by legendary coach Buzz Harvey as a freshman – unheard of then. And Grandmaison returned a couple of punts for TDs right away cementing his spot. Many have called him the best running back they’ve ever seen.

There you go. Baseball. Honors. Holman history. It all adds up to fun on the Fourth. Enjoy.

Tom King can be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or on twitter @Telegraph _TomK.

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